FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT UIGHURS - PAGE 2

The United States has added a Muslim separatist group to a State Department list of terrorist organizations, overriding human-rights concerns about China's repression of Muslim religious and political freedoms in the far west region of the country. The U.S. has criticized China's treatment of the Muslim ethnic Uighur people, but relations with Beijing have improved dramatically because of China's support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism, and Washington has acknowledged that China has suffered several small-scale terrorist attacks at the hands of Uighur militants.

A rare public protest in the northwestern Chinese city of Urumqi turned violent Sunday as thousands of Uighurs, a Muslim minority, took to the streets to vent grievances about discrimination. The official New China News Agency said rioters were "attacking passers-by and setting fire to vehicles," but representatives for the Uighurs described a peaceful protest that turned ugly because of government brutality. The news agency said at least three people were killed. Witnesses reported that riot police arrived on the scene in armored personnel carriers, dispersing the crowd with water cannons and tear gas, and firing shots into the air. At least 300 people were reported to have been arrested.

The remote Pacific island nation of Palau said Wednesday it has agreed to a U.S. request to temporarily resettle up to 17 Chinese Muslims now held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. In a statement released to The Associated Press on Wednesday, Palau President Johnson Toribiong said his government had "agreed to accommodate the United States of America's request to temporarily resettle in Palau up to 17 ethnic Uighur detainees ... subject to periodic review." Toribiong says his tiny country is "honored and proud" to resettle the detainees.

By David Pierson and Barbara Demick, Tribune Newspapers | July 8, 2009

Chinese President Hu Jintao abandoned plans to attend the G-8 summit in Italy, returning home Wednesday in response to ethnic violence in the west in Xinjiang province that has left at least 156 people dead, the state-run Xinhua news agency said. State Councilor Dai Bingguo will attend the G-8 summit in Hu's place, the agency said. Hours earlier, thousands of Chinese, many wielding sticks, clubs and knives, marched through Uighur neighborhoods of the northwestern city of Urumqi chanting "blood for blood" and singing the Chinese national anthem.

Reports of official abuses against China's Muslim Uighur minority have increased since the global anti-terrorism campaign began, UN human-rights chief Mary Robinson said Friday. Wrapping up a two-day visit to China, Robinson also said she urged Chinese officials to invite the UN torture inspector to visit. Chinese officials responded "positively," she told reporters. Robinson said a rise has been noted in the numbers and seriousness of complaints about abuses against Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in China's northwestern Xinjiang region.

An exile group said Monday that China had executed five ethnic Uighurs who were accused of involvement in riots that rocked the country's predominantly Muslim northwestern province of Xinjiang last month. But Chinese officials in Xinjiang dismissed the allegation as "laughable." "We know for sure that five (Uighurs) were executed March 20," Mukhiddin Mukhlisi, a spokesman for the United National Revolutionary Front of East Turkestan, said at a congress of exile Uighurs near the Kazak capital, Almaty.

The Obama administration has all but abandoned plans to resettle some detainees from Guantanamo Bay in the United States, officials said, a recognition that the task had become politically impossible because of congressional opposition. The shift came as the administration announced Thursday that it had transferred six detainees from the prison, including four Chinese Muslims sent to Bermuda, as it tries to meet a one-year deadline for shutting down the controversial facility. The administration had hoped to move some of the Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, to the U.S. as a signal to other countries that they were not dangerous.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Gangs armed with knives attacked a police station and a local government building on Wednesday in China's restive far western Xinjiang region, leaving 27 dead in clashes with police, the government news agency Xinhua said. The unrest in the region, home to a large Muslim Uighur minority, was the deadliest since July 2009, when nearly 200 people were killed in riots pitting Uighurs against ethnic Chinese in the region's capital Urumqi. Xinhua said Wednesday's unrest erupted at about 6 a.m. in the remote township of Lukqun, about 200 km (120 miles)

On the outskirts of this ancient oasis town, soldiers armed with submachine guns and dressed in the crisp green uniforms of the People's Liberation Army stop and search every vehicle, in just one small sign of the underlying tensions in this farthest-flung outpost of Chinese sovereignty. In centuries past, Kashgar was a vital stop along the legendary Silk Road, the world's main East-West trading route along which merchant caravans ferried Chinese silks, porcelain and gemstones across the mountains and deserts of central Asia.